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Episode 71 – Catching Dictators with Reed Brody

This episode of Asymmetrical Haircuts is supported by JusticeInfo.net.

Reed Brody: 00:05  I said, This is a wake-up call to all dictators around the world. But really, it wasn’t. What it was, was a wake-up call to activists and to victims. We realized we had a new tool to bring to justice people who seemed out of the reach of justice.

[INTRO MUSIC]

Narrator: 00:23  Medieval crimes are being committed. I come with clean hands. Victims of horrific crimes want justice. We don’t have anything better than this. This is Asymmetrical Haircuts, your international justice podcast with Janet Anderson and Stephanie van den Berg.

Janet: 00:41  All rise. Hi, Steph.

Stephanie: 00:43  Hi, Janet.

Janet: 00:44  And, Steph, I have a confession to make. I have completely failed this week. I have not managed to write a script. I have not managed to prepare questions. I have just failed.

Stephanie: 00:56  Okay… but I think you’re one up on me because here I see a book with all kinds of notes that you’ve obviously read through, and I don’t even have a book.

Janet: 01:05  I know, I know. You don’t have the book, and I even organized the guest. But my assumption was that with our guest, we kind of wind him up and let him go. We just interrupt at various points to ask little questions to push him along the way. He’s just such a great speaker that I don’t think we even need a script. 

Stephanie: 01:24 Probably not. What do you think, Reed?

Reed Brody: 01:26  Well, sure, wind me up. But, you know, it’s a good book. And I see that you do have all kinds of notations and Post-its on the book, so maybe we can get to that.

Janet: 01:37  Absolutely. How would you like to introduce yourself, Reed? What’s your normal way of saying who you are?

Reed Brody: 01:43  Oh my God. Now I’ve kind of changed. I used to say “human rights lawyer.” Now I say “war crimes prosecutor.” But really, I consider myself an activist. I consider myself an activist for social justice.

Stephanie: 01:57  So how did you get interested in international human rights and international justice?

Reed Brody: 02:02  So I was a young lawyer at the New York State Attorney General’s Office. A colleague of mine’s brother was a priest in a little village in Nicaragua, and we went down to visit him. His village was being attacked. The whole region was being attacked by these U.S.-backed Contras. The week we were there, he had a meeting of the pastoral team, and people were coming up to us, taking us by the shoulders and saying, “Do you realize that people being sent by your country have just burned down this village? They’ve just killed these people. My husband was killed.” They made me promise to go back and tell Americans what I had seen. 

And I quit my job at the New York State Attorney General’s office. I went back to Nicaragua. I spent five months going around the country documenting, you know, meeting victims, atrocity victims and witnesses. And I wrote a report that was on the front page of the New York Times. I was personally attacked by President Reagan as a Sandinista sympathizer. But the report actually helped to get Congress to cut off Contra Aid, which, of course, then resulted in the whole Iran-Contra scandal. But I was 30 years old at the time. And, you know, that gave me confidence that, you know, I could help change the world. And that’s been, ever since then, I’ve been working on international human rights issues.

Stephanie: 03:27  And for those of you who haven’t recognized this and think who are they talking about, which probably our listenership doesn’t, but we are here with Reed Brody. He has a new book out that’s called To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hussein Abrey. And hopefully he’s going to tell us all about it.

Stephanie: 03:46  And, I mean, he’s got some lovely quotes that he’s using in promoting it. Checking through all of this, I really do appreciate this quote to start with: “part political thriller, part memoir, part handbook for human rights attorneys”. Let’s take each of those in turn. The last part first—”handbook for human rights attorneys”. What is it that you’re telling people about how to operate in this world?

Reed Brody: 04:14  Well, first I’m saying that it’s possible. We spent 18 years pursuing Hissène Habré together with his victims in particular. For most of that time, people told us we were crazy—that other African dictators would never let one of their own be prosecuted, that the United States and France, which had brought Hissène Habré to power and supported him, would never let us do it. So really, a big reason I wrote the book was to show that we weren’t crazy.

Janet: 04:46  But where does that sense of it is possible come from? In the book you start off with your Pinochet moment. Is that where it comes from? Maybe you should explain Pinochet to those who are a bit too young to remember.

Reed Brody: 05:01  Sure. So in 1998, just after we got back from the Rome Conference that established the International Criminal Court, a couple of months later news came from London that Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile, had been arrested in London on a warrant from a Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, for crimes allegedly committed twenty-five years earlier in Chile.

For us, this was really the rubber hitting the road. This was the real test of whether all these principles—Nuremberg, the Convention Against Torture, the ICC—actually meant something. Of course, Pinochet challenged his arrest before the British courts. He said, “You can’t arrest me. I’m a former head of state.”

Janet: 05:53  And then it went right the way up to the highest court.

Reed Brody: 05:55  It went all the way up to the highest court, which at the time was the Judicial Committee of the House of Lords. I immediately went to London, expecting to go for a few days, and ended up spending the better part of six months there, as the case was heard three times before the House of Lords.

When the House of Lords ruled that Pinochet could, in fact, be arrested anywhere in the world despite his status as a former head of state, we realized this was a champagne moment.

For me as a lawyer, I’d been used to being right and losing. Here, not only did we win, but we won a case against the iconic Latin American dictator that I had grown up hating.

I said, in a quote that the Human Rights Watch press office loved, “This is a wake-up call to all dictators around the world.” But really it wasn’t. What it was, was a wake-up call to activists and to victims. We realized we had a new tool to bring to justice people who seemed out of the reach of justice.

And so this was really the human rights movement. It’s hard to overstate the excitement within the human rights movement. Pinochet was arrested because of the work of Chilean victims and Spanish lawyers. And this was possible. There were meetings with Amnesty International, FIDH, the ICJ, and everyone else asking, “Who’s going to be the next Pinochet?” How are we.. At the time, we really saw a very different trajectory for all of this. And, you know, that’s when I actually had this map on the wall in my office, and I asked everybody at Human Rights Watch to come and, you know…

Janet: 07:44  …and pin on their favourite dictator.

Reed Brody: 07:45  Pin on their dictators—or their torturers—to see where they were. It was like a mapping exercise with a real map and real dictators. And, you know, obviously to get Pinochet arrested and to have the House of Lords decide, the stars had to be in a certain alignment. I mean, the Labour government had just come in. Tony Blair was promising an ethical foreign policy. It was no longer Margaret Thatcher. Pinochet was a very reviled person, you know. Then we started looking around the world. That was when I was approached by the Chadian victims.

Stephanie: 08:18  Because you then became, after that, you became the dictator hunter. And, you know, the kind of, I guess, a little bit occasionally the Indiana Jones of international law, you even have the scarf to go with it. So they saw that you were doing this and said, we have this guy.

Reed Brody: 08:37  Exactly. Delphine Djiraïbé of the Chadian Association for Human Rights came to visit me while she was doing a fellowship at Columbia. She said, “We have somebody who’s killed even more people than Pinochet. His name is Hissène Habré.”

What was especially interesting to me was that Habré was in Senegal. I felt very strongly—and my colleagues did too—that we needed to focus on cases that expanded the horizons of international justice and universal jurisdiction. And we didn’t want, to the extent there was a pushback to the Pinochet case, it was that it’s always the Europeans prosecuting colonies, you know.

Janet: 09:22  Which is regularly still the case, isn’t it? Still where we see in Germany with Syria, Finland with Liberia—in sort of wherever from another continent, it’s still that sense.

Reed Brody: 09:35  Absolutely. And here, you know, he was in Senegal, and Senegal had been the first country to have ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. It’s a country that, you know, considers itself to be in the avant-garde on international justice. We felt that if we could persuade Senegal to prosecute Hissène Habré under universal jurisdiction, we would really have developed the law.

Stephanie: 09:59  And this is kind of where your and my timeline interact, because I’d met you in The Hague doing ICC things, and then I went to Senegal for two years in 2008, where who shows up but Reed Brody and has a new dictator. And I remember you were then giving a lot of press conferences in Dakar, and I would get sent out regularly, where you would basically chide the Senegalese government, because Habre was living at Point E, I think at that point, really close. Everybody knew where he lived, and you kept going at the Senegalese government for not doing it.

And I kept in the beginning thinking, I have to write about it also, because I was working for a French language agency at that time. And of course, Habre and Chad or Francophone Africa, so it was a big deal. But you were not getting a lot of attention in the beginning. And then it just gained momentum. And I realized, saw it play out and thought, Reed is really going to get his case. Wow.

Reed Brody: 10:53  Well, there were many times that it seemed like, you know, it was a fool’s errand. I think, you know, the head of the Victims Association, Clément Abaïfouta, calculated that he had been to Senegal 20 times. The key, in fact, to the success here was not, you know, Reed Brody, the so-called dictator hunter. It was really the front and center role of the victims, who became personalities in their own right, and who became really the saga, what they called on the French media, the soap opera, the political and legal soap opera, you know, that would play out on Radio France International. And people would hear, I mean, Souleymane Guengueng, who, you know, really began, and my book, begins and ends with Souleymane, begins with Souleymane in prison, as people are dying around him. And he takes an oath before God that if he ever gets out, he will fight for justice.

And he does, and he starts, he comes out a walking skeleton, and he, you know, people look at him like he was crazy. But he creates a Victims Association. He’s driven out of the country at a certain point. Clément Abaïfouta, the so-called the gravedigger, who had buried hundreds of his cellmates, takes over the Victims Association. Jacqueline Moudeïna, the victim’s lawyer, who was almost assassinated, and who pleaded the case before the different tribunals, with fragments of grenade in her leg. I mean, these people mobilize public opinion, and they’re well known in Africa. People were rooting for them.

Stephanie: 12:16  Absolutely. Jacqueline is also a force of nature when you speak to her and when she presents, and Souleymane as well. They would come to all these press conferences, and as a journalist you were sitting there thinking, “Why isn’t there this trial? Why aren’t these people doing something?” And that determination showed through in everything.

Janet: 12:39  But if I put it back to that quote again, the political thriller, you’ve named all kinds of very important people as part of the team behind, etc. But at the end of the day, does it not take kind of political stars to align in order to be able to push things through? I mean, that’s what happened in Senegal, wasn’t it? I mean, the same thing that happened in the UK, you had a change of government, things could go through. In Senegal, you have a change of government, you have a new minister of justice who just says, no, I’m actually going to do this, and I’m going to push it through. Isn’t that really what it depends on?

Reed Brody: 13:28  It depends on, you know, both mobilization, luck. I mean, we had nothing to do with Macky Sall defeating Abdoulaye Wade and naming Mimi Touré as minister of justice, but we had met with Macky Sall. We had met with every single politician, every single important person in Senegal. We met with Macky Sall together with the victims, together with a Senegalese victim. So there was actually a Senegalese merchant, Abdoulaye Mangey, who had survived Habré’s prisons, who was rescued actually by the Senegalese government, and who became kind of the de facto spokesperson. I mean, this is like a really average Senegalese guy, right?

Janet: 14:13  He has the most average Senegalese name.

Reed Brody: 14:15  And the most, you know, he was a merchant. He was selling gold and stones around Africa, and he got arrested together with his comrade, basically in order to rob them, but then he was thrown in his and Habré’s jails. His comrade Demba died.

He survived. You know, very typical guy goes to the mosque in Touba, gives, I mean, we spent, you know, donors’ money on, you know…

Janet: 14:43  …On getting him to the mosque in Touba.

Reed Brody: 14:44  No—we spent donors’ money on sacrifices for marabouts.

Stephanie: 14:48  We have to explain this. So in Senegal, they are largely Muslim, but they have these Marabout Islamic religious leader, and Touba is one of the, like, big religious centers that people go to, and they sacrifice, and they get gris-gris, and then you pray to God, and then he gives you things, and it’s a very, very Senegalese thing to do.

Reed Brody: 15:08  That’s right. I mean, in order to cultivate the religious leaders, one of the things that traditionally is done is that we just, okay, you know, sacrifice a cow, give the meat to the poor, give out, you know, kola nuts, and this was the way Abdou was cultivating the religious leaders. So, I mean, we went to Macky Sall, and, you know, Abdou Hamangé in Wolof tells Macky Sall, look, these guys from Chad, this Blanc over here, this white guy, I’m telling you what happened, you know?

And so, yeah, I mean, it was total luck for us that Abdoulaye Wade was not re-elected. It was totally luck for us that Hizn al-Habri didn’t die before the trial, even though he pretended to have heart attacks on the eve of the trial. But, you know, you have to be in a position to take advantage of that luck, and I really think it was, as you say, this recognition that the victims deserve justice.

I mean, you know, at a certain point in the case when, because we filed the case in Senegal, he was arrested in Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade stepped in, the cases were dismissed, we filed the case in Belgium, which had this long-arm universal jurisdiction law. Belgium spent four years investigating the case and was about to indict, and, you know, the Belgian law got caught up in its own generosity, and everybody was filing cases in Belgium. And it was okay when it was little Africans who were being pursued, but when it was Israeli leaders, and particularly when it was George Bush’s Donald Rumsfeld came to Belgium and said, if you don’t get rid of this law, if NATO leaders can’t come to Belgium without worrying about being arrested, we’re going to have to move NATO.

And the law fell like a house of cards, and our case depended on the Belgian law. And we brought Soleiman to Belgium. And, you know, here he did things that a lawyer like me can’t do.

I mean, he looked them in, he looked the foreign minister, the justice minister, the assemblyman in the eye, you know, and said, I came out of jail. He tells the story, you know, I took an oath before God that if I was going to fight for justice, and we thought we were going to have justice in Senegal, and they betrayed us. And then we went to Belgium, and you sent us a judge, and we were so happy.

It was like a lifeline. And now you’re telling me because of Donald Rumsfeld, I can’t have justice. Like, no, no, Mr. Guengueng, we’ll figure out a way. And so when the Belgian law was repealed, they actually put in a clause that recognized certain cases, certain types of cases that could go forward. And so the Habre case went forward because of this kind of personal appeal that only a victim can make.

Janet: 17:28  The other part to this quote is a memoir. And so kind of the personal side of things, is that really a warning to people as well of how this can kind of consume your life to say, yeah, it can be tough?

Reed Brody: 18:02  Well, yeah, it was all consuming. I mean, you know, I describe in the book that the verdict not only was a huge vindication, but it was also a relief. I mean, my life was no longer going to be 24-7 Hissène Habré.

I grew up reading Greek mythology with my father, and the book also is kind of describes a certain personal odyssey from being, you know, the dictator hunter who’s coming in to explain how we’re going to do things to, you know, that same as Odysseus did, the same kind of path through losing your hubris and to realizing that this case has to be about the victims, and it has to be satisfying for them, and they have to be the people who get the benefit out of this.

And that it’s really, in many ways, the quest for justice is justice, and it’s their struggle. And I feel like the trial, although it took us, or it took me, you know, 16 years to get there, when we got there, it meant so much more than if we just would have gotten him prosecuted right away. We understood much better what it was about and what we wanted the trial to do.

Stephanie: 19:13  Do you think, because that’s like a favorite pet peeve of mine, this when international justice started in the 1990s, and you had the ad hoc tribunals, and the belief was always that there would be reconciliation, and that justice would, and accountability would bring some kind of mystical coming together. Societal change. Because there would be one truth that everybody would then unite around, and that would stop also revisionism and those things.

And I’m obviously looking at the Yugoslav tribunal, and that very obviously didn’t work. And so I always feel that I understand the optimism in the 1990s, and I’m looking at things like Ukraine, and the people fighting now to get accountability, and I kind of see the devastation and think this is going to be 20 years maybe before there and then you had a court case. And then what does that say? What do victims really gain from that court case? So I’m wondering for Hissène Habré, you say it was really a relief for you. Do you feel that the victims there really got what they wanted?

Reed Brody: 20:18  Yes and no. I mean, in many ways the quest for justice is justice, in the sense that in those 15-20 years the victims became heroes to their families, to their country. One day we were in Dakar, we were watching, because the trial was televised.

So people in Chad are watching their former dictator on trial. And he’s not on trial because their current dictator wanted him to be on trial. They’re on trial because crazy people and their neighbors like Jacqueline Moudeïna, Souleymane Guengueng, and others put him there.

And for me, that is already a huge victory, no matter whatever happens, that this idea that you can do it. For many of the victims, even testifying. I mean, for the victims of sexual violence who came and testified.

Janet: 21:16  That’s just the most extraordinary chapter in the book. I mean, I was aware of the testimonies, but the idea that this woman in court testifies directly about… Yeah, about Habre raping her. Yeah, and exactly the physicality of that. And looks him directly in the eye, and other victims as well, look him in the eye and tell him. I can’t imagine how that felt.

Reed Brody: 21:44  For them, it was a huge moment. And after that, they didn’t care. They didn’t care if he was convicted, they didn’t care. Whatever happened, they told their story. He was sitting there.

Stephanie: 21:54  He had to listen to them. He couldn’t dismiss them.

Reed Brody: 21:56  And there was one of the survivors of rape and of sexual slavery. I mean, there were women who were sent to serve as sexual slaves in Habre’s army. And we had documents. We had documents to show all of this. But Kaltouma Defallah, in her testimony, she says, I am so proud to be here testifying today. This man who used to be the most powerful man in Chad, and now I’m the one who’s speaking, and he has to listen to me. And so many victims said that kind of thing. And to me, that was just… That was victory. And to them, that was victory.

Janet: 22:34  Where’s the “no,” then? You say yes and no.

Reed Brody: 22:37  Well, I think we’re still waiting for compensation for the victims. The Chadian government actually announced last month that they were giving $15 million to a fund for the victims, together with $5 million from the African Union. That’s about $3,000 per victim.

Not a lot compared to what they’ve suffered, but still something considerable. But it’s almost required the same tenacity to get the compensation that it did to bring him to justice. Yeah.

Stephanie: 23:11  That’s a kind of life-changing amount of money in Chad.

Reed Brody: 23:15  Absolutely. For many of them who are really destitute, I mean, not all of them, but yeah, for many of them, this makes a huge, huge difference if they get the money. I mean, the money’s been announced, but let’s see it actually happening.

Janet: 23:27  And beyond Habre, where are we now? I know that that’s what the whole book is about, Habre, and that’s what we’re focused on, but Reed Brody isn’t only focused on that. What else? What should we be looking out for that you are also working on?

Reed Brody: 23:42  Well, one thing I want to share is that there’s a lot of justice happening in the world. We’re here, and I’m here for the Assembly of State Parties of the ICC, but in 20 years, and for $2 billion, the ICC has never sustained the conviction of any state official anywhere in the world. Five African warlords, not even five African soldiers. But of course, we’re here because the ICC allows a lot of this other stuff to happen. I mean, Hiss and Habre would not have been prosecuted without the ICC.

Janet: 24:18  What do you mean by that? You mean by the Roman statute system, or by the fact that it’s on the agenda, or why?

Reed Brody: 24:24  Well, in this particular case, the African Union understood that it could not credibly tell the ICC lay off unless it could show that it could prosecute its own. And so the African Union, even before, in fact, Macky Sall was elected, the African Union started investing in this case. And Habre was prosecuted before a hybrid tribunal created between Senegal and the African Union.

The African Union put a lot of political capital into this case, largely to get the ICC off their backs. And I mean, we see that playing out in Guinea, we see it in Colombia, we see it in other places. The ICC is an incredibly important institution for the transposition of the Rome statute into domestic laws, for the pressure, also for the norm that it creates, the international commitment, at least verbally, to the idea that there should be no impunity for the worst crimes.

Stephanie: 25:16  Absolutely. I think that’s also what you see now, is that when, with something like Ukraine happening, the question is no longer, will there be accountability? But the question is much more, how exactly and when? But there’s no, you know, in the 1990s, and a bit beyond, the discussion was always, should there be and in what sense? And now it’s, absolutely, there should be. How are we going to do it? And so you see the discussion really shift. And I guess that from, in your lifetime, you’ve seen it go from, will there ever be an end to impunity, to there should be an end to impunity, to now, how and when accountability, but not the question that it should happen is no longer there. Right.

Reed Brody: 26:08  I mean, I think we’re seeing a huge amount of justice on the national and hybrid level, thanks to NGO activism. I mean, you see most of the important universal jurisdiction cases happening around the world, are the fruit of, you know, people like Alain Werner at Civitas Maxima, who is, you know, together with his Liberian partners, tracking the Liberians all over the world. You know, you see the Syrian NGOs, very much, you know, behind the prosecutions in France, particularly in Germany. A lot of countries have set up these, you know, war crimes units within their prosecutions office or within even the judiciary. So there’s, you know, there’s more and more at the national and hybrid level.

Janet: 26:57  You still seem to be connected though, mainly to West Africa. So you’re working on Gambia, you’re working on Equatorial Guinea, you know, where are, maybe discuss those two to start with.

Reed Brody: 27:08  Well, what I also find attractive about these cases is that they are replicable. You know, just the same way that, you know, Delphine Djiraïbé of Chad came to me and said, we want to do what the Chileans did in Pinochet. I was approached by Gambian victims who said, we want to do what, you know, the Chadians did.

And actually, when Habre was convicted on appeal, it was just around the time that Yahya Jammeh left Gambia. And we went from Dakar to Banjul with Jacqueline, with Abdur Rahman, with Clément, with Souleymane. We went, we had a meeting with the new association of Gambian victims. And they said, we can do that too. And I think if you look all over West Africa, whether it’s Guinea or Liberia, people look at this and say, we can do that too. And right now in Gambia, I mean, there are very good victim-led organizations who are fighting for justice.

There was a truth commission that was just also a soap opera, like daily TV with perpetrators and victims. It was incredible spectator event. And it really showed to Gambians and to outsiders the depth of the cruelty of the Yahya Jammeh regime. Now, Jammeh is in exile in Equatorial Guinea. We carried out some investigations as well that showed that Jammeh had a system of having women brought to him who he abused and raped. And one of the women, Toufah Jallow, a former pageant queen, spoke out publicly about how Yahya Jammeh had raped her.

There was also a case in Gambia, the worst massacre under Yahya Jammeh was actually 59 West African migrants, including 44 from Ghana, who were trying to get to Europe, were beached in Gambia, were at a certain moment assumed to be mistaken for mercenaries. They were all executed. And not only was it the worst massacre, but it implicates all the countries of the region.

So the proposal right now in Gambia is to create kind of on the Hissène Habré model, a hybrid court between Gambia and ECOWAS, the West African region, in order to prosecute these crimes. And of course, Jammeh is in exile in Equatorial Guinea, which is a dictatorship, and Obiang has already said he’s going to protect Yahya Jammeh. But the hope is that if you federate all of these other countries in West Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, it would be very difficult for Obiang to say no to a request by an African regional court. And so the Gambian government has, you know, is supporting this idea. And it’s actually the Minister of Justice of Gambia was recently at Abuja ECOWAS headquarters to start the process of creating some kind of a hybrid tribunal.

Janet: 30:00  So is that the future, do you think? At least one future for international criminal justice is something that’s partly locally owned, with political support, often regionally. Is that the model we should be looking for?

Reed Brody: 30:18  I think that what we learned in the Habre case is that through the artifice of hybridization, you can basically do what you want. You know, you can write a statute of a court to fit the purpose. Obviously, there has to be jurisdiction, you have to give the defendant a fair trial.

But in terms of who’s going to be supporting how much international assistance you need, how many international judges you need, what the statute of the court should be, whether the trial should be televised, where it should sit, all of these can kind of be purpose built, you know, once you have jurisdiction. And I mean, we’re seeing that also with Ukraine.

Stephanie: 31:00 Yeah, that’s the debate. We won’t get into that one because that’s a huge debate.

Reed Brody: 31:04  That’s a whole other story. You know, but I see that as really the wave, I mean, a lot of hybrid courts, and each one has a different, each one is different. And each one can be built to fit, you know, the purpose, and to give it the maximum ability to deliver justice.

Janet: 31:23  And do you think because I see where hybrid courts could be the future, you also said, well, in 20 years, the ICC has never sustained a prosecution against the state official. Will hybrid courts be able to do that? Because there’s, in as much as the ICC is political, the hybrid court is also always a political game of who you can prosecute at what point because of this political stars aligning? Do you think they could fill that gap? Or is it just shown that actually, prosecuting state officials, it’s much more difficult than we thought at the beginning?

Reed Brody: 31:59  Prosecuting state officials, while they’re in power is practically impossible. I mean, let’s be honest. The real job of getting rid of state officials is the people of the country have to get those officials out. And then you can prosecute them.

Janet: 32:15  You need regime change.

Reed Brody: 32:16  You need regime change from, you know, from within. But I think, you know, what we need to be doing in any event is documenting cases, preparing cases. One of the waves of the future, I believe, is a standing international investigatory mechanism.

Stephanie: 32:34  We’re going to do a podcast on that next year.

Reed Brody: 32:37  So right now you have international investigatory mechanisms for Syria, for Myanmar, and for Daesh. And they are preparing cases and distributing them. I mean, a lot of the prosecutions around Europe.

Stephanie: 32:51  Have come through the IIIM.

Reed Brody: 32:52  And, you know, the future might be to have a standing mechanism like that, that could prepare cases for, you know, different problematic countries and then distribute them to national or international jurisdictions.

Stephanie: 33:09  I have the sense that we could carry on chatting for at least another hour, but we do also have our joint obligations, I think, to go back to the main court. Maybe you’ve got a final question, Stephanie?

Janet: 33:21  I have a final question, which is going to be a bit of the memoir and looking back at things like, before we go move on to the asymmetrical haircuts question, but my very, I guess, job interviewee question would be, if you look back now, what would you have liked to known when you started with this work? What would you tell somebody who’s now starting with this work, where you’re like, it would have been good if I understood that before I did all of this?

Stephanie: 33:47  What would you have said to that young Reed Brody who popped along to Pinochet and said, you know, maybe I’ll be here for a few days to go rah, rah, rah.

Reed Brody: 33:54  Well, he was already not such a young Reed Brody at the time.

Stephanie: 33:59  Younger.

Reed Brody: 34:00  A younger Reed Brody. You know, it’s a long haul. I don’t know.

I mean, you know, I gave my life, big portion of my life to this. I mean, I was doing other things at the time. I mean, during the Harbright case, I wrote four reports on Bush administration torture.

I, you know, did a lot of other things, but really this was, this had taken over my life. And I think, you know, justices can be, and often is, it’s a long haul. I’m not answering your good question. Sorry.

Janet: 34:28  Is that the advice then, just to recognize it can take a long time?

Reed: 34:31  You know, I mean, my advice would be really listen to the victims, listen to what they want. Ultimately, I think we were, we were fortunate that it took us so long that we had to get our act together and ultimately make the trial look like something that the victims wanted. But I would say, you know, begin by listening, begin by listening to what civil society wants and what victims want.

Stephanie: 34:58  Now, at the end of our podcast, we always ask a few different questions. We usually ask, what didn’t we ask you that we should have done? You know, I think we’ve covered a lot. We also ask, what’s your favorite case? If it’s not Habre, I don’t know what it is.

Janet: 35:11  Do you have another favorite trial or a case that you, when you teach? I know that you teach occasionally in universities, is there a case that you like to talk about?

Reed Brody: 35:20  Yeah, the Rios-Montt case in Guatemala. Another favorite dictator. Another favorite dictator. I mean, we, and this goes back to what I said about things being replicable. When we were preparing the Hissène Habré trial, we watched a movie or movie segments that Pamela Yates and Paco de Onís had made about the Rios-Montt trial.

Stephanie: 35:43  That’s called Granito, isn’t it?

Reed Brody: 35:45  Yeah, part of it is in Granito, but they also made a series called Dictator in the Dock, which is little segments of the trial. And, you know, this was another trial that was pushed forward over decades by the most disempowered people in the Americas, the indigenous highlanders of Guatemala, together with very active NGOs. And they organized the trial around, you know, context witnesses, specific witnesses. It was just a really a model that we followed. We also watched The Raboteau Trial, there’s a movie about the Raboteau trial in Haiti, which I was actually worked on at a certain point.

Stephanie: 36:26  I don’t know that one, so I’m going to look that one up.

Reed Brody: 36:28  It was a prosecution of a slum massacre committed during a de facto regime. I actually began, I worked in Haiti for many years, but this is passed down from one case to another. I mean, Alain Werner worked on the Hissène Habré case. He was my student. Philip Grant was my intern. You know, these are things that we can pass on. I mean, not everybody can be, you know, Karim Khan or Fatou Bensouda, but anybody can be Reed Brody or Souleymane Guengueng or Alain Werner, you know. So I think that’s what’s exciting about this kind of justice is that it’s justice that we are promoting from below rather than justice that’s coming from a distant prosecutor in the Hague.

Stephanie: 37:08  And our final question is always, have you been watching anything recently, listening to anything recently, reading anything recently that you’d like to share with the audience? And it doesn’t have to be in our world. It can be about zombie takeovers or whatever it is, or classical music that you listen to, whatever.

Janet: 37:31  Or what other activity you have to get your mind off international justice. Do you do anything apart from this?

Reed Brody: 37:37  I swim. I swim. Stephanie and I, we both like cold water swimming.

Janet: 37:42  I teed up this question because on the way over here in the Uber, Reed and I talked about cold water swimming.

Stephanie: 37:47  Outdoors in the marshes.

Reed Brody: 37:50  You’re lucky. I go, the water’s a little warmer, but it gets cold around now. My partner is a filmmaker, so I watch movies like every day, but I would suggest one that is within our sphere, which is the Argentina 1985 movie about the- I just watched that last night and it provided a really interesting conversation with my husband who was in Argentina in 1985 during that time as a student and remembers it.

Janet: 38:03  I just watched that last night and it provided a really interesting conversation with my husband who was in Argentina in 1985 during that time as a student and remembers it. But what was, I don’t know, what was curious about it to you? (8:20) What did you find most interesting?

Reed Brody: 38:21  Well, I just found it a fascinating courtroom drama about one of the most important trials of human rights ever. Over a million people have seen the movie in Argentina. It has recreated a debate about the military and about justice.

And it was just, it was a great courtroom drama.

Janet: 38:40  And it was also one of the central figures in it is Luis Moreno Ocampo, one of the first prosecutors of the, the first prosecutor of the ICC. So just fascinating to see, for me at least, the societal dynamics that were going on at the time that enabled that particular, again, luck, politics, individuals, this combination.

Reed Brody: 39:02  Yeah. I mean, I read a lot in the Argentine press about the movie and some people say that it obviously can’t go into all of the background and what the different governmental imperatives were and stuff, but it is a great, and I know not only Luis Moreno Ocampo, but the chief prosecutors, Strassera, who later became ambassador in Geneva. But it was a great trial and it really set the, you know, it was the first wave of justice.

This was before the ICC. This was, in fact, a lot of the modern transitional justice movement comes from out of Argentina and Chile. And this was the kind of the, you know, the trial that- And it’s very telling.

Stephanie: 39:44  I mean, Luis Moreno Ocampo became the first prosecutor of the ICC, also on the back of being the person who did that in Argentina and being the kind of eminent person who would do that.

Stephanie: 39:59  Yeah, absolutely. So thank you very much, Reed, for making time for escaping from the Assembly of States Parties, along with Stephanie to come here to record in our Normal Place Humanity Hub.

Stephanie: 40:07  And we have to, of course, plug Reed’s book as the thing that you should have on your nightstand, To Catch a Dictator: the Pursuit and Trial of His Hissène Habré by, of course, Reed Brody. Thank you very much, Reed.

Reed Brody: 40:17  You’re quite welcome, Janet and Stephanie. It was great.

Stephanie: 40:19  Thank you.

[OUTRO TUNE]

This podcast was created and presented by Janet Anderson and Stephanie van den Berg. It is published in partnership with justiceinfo.net. You can find show notes and additional blogs on asymmetricalhaircuts.com. It is recorded in the Hague Humanity Hub, home to a community of innovators in the field of peace, justice, development and humanitarian action. Music is by audionautix.com. And the show is available on every major podcast service. So please subscribe, give us a rating and spread the word.

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